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What's In a Name? Dept.: I see Intel is once again coming up with strange names for its products. The latest is Centrino, Intel's new 802.11b chipset. I assume this is one of those combination-association name creations dreamed up by some consultants. In this case centric, central, neutrino, and maybe bambino come to mind as the progenitors. The name hints at "the core of things" and the ubiquity of radio waves. (Neutrinos are everywhere).

The company will apparently continue to use a variation of the Intel Inside logo with Centrino-equipped products. To me, the name sounds too Italian and not futuristic at all, but more like a fancy salami you'd find in Genoa. "I'll have a quarter pound of sliced centrinomild, not hot!" Centrino also brings to mind some sort of weird fish you might find on the Greek Islands. "I'll have a centrino sandwich on rye, no mayo!" I think they missed the mark with this one. Either that, or I'm hungry, and I need to travel. The last association (then I'll stop): Centrino sounds like a low-priced Asian sports coupe. "The new 240-HP Centrino from Hyundai!"

Camera of the Decade Dept.: Many of you know that I'm a big fan of the Olympus line of digital cameras for a lot of reasons, but mainly because of battery management and superior flash capabilities. Those two factors have consistently set these cameras apartall else being equal. That is, until the release of the mind-boggling little 5.0-megapixel Olympus C-5050 Zoom ($800 street). In this camera, Olympus seems to have incorporated every suggestion anyone has ever made. It might actually be too much camera for a newbie. I had to read the manual! Gasp!

The C-5050 is essentially a miniaturized version of the Olympus E-20 pro model. It will accept three forms of mediaCompactFlash, finally!and has a movable screen, noise reduction, a hot shoe, a fast f1.8 lens, bracket shooting, a remote control, and RAW format support. The company also reinstituted the inclusion of a nickel hydride battery charger in the box. I understand this camera's first production run sold out immediately. It has the heft and gestalt of a classic Leica model. Currently, this is the only camera I will recommend when someone asks.

I've always thought that Olympus should add CompactFlash capability to its small cameras, just to accommodate the need for higher capacity. The need for CompactFlash became apparent as camera pixel counts increased and SmartMedia couldn't deliver enough capacity. SanDisk makes a 1GB CF card that is perfect for a long trip. And all the competitive new media, such as Panasonic SecureDigital, Olympus xD-Picture Card, SmartMedia, and Sony Memory Stick typically cost twice as much per byte as CF, and none can deliver the same capacity. That said, I see that SanDisk is working with Sony to come up with a 1GB Memory Stick by April. This will effectively kill SD and SmartMedia. And as a media designed for compact cameras, Olympus xD has an uncertain future.

More Bad News Dept.: We all know that the printer companies have tried to turn their businesses into razor-blade schemes by selling printers at a loss and profiting from expensive supplies. You can almost buy a new printer for the same price as some replacement ink cartridges. It didn't take China long to figure out that money can be made selling replacement cartridges, which soon flooded the market, much to the chagrin of printer makers.

So they took the next step and added a proprietary chip to the cartridges to prevent unauthorized replacements. Soon after, chips were invented that could fool printers. In fact, a North Carolina company called Static Control Components is being sued by Lexmark for making cartridge clone chips. Lexmark is using the miserable Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as leverage, saying these clone chips violate the act by bypassing copy protection. Lexmark should win merely by having more lawyers and going through civil instead of criminal courts.

As Hiawatha Bray writes in The Boston Globe: "You can see the future. Already some auto parts have chips embedded in them. Imagine a day when you can only replace a Ford headlamp with another Ford headlamp, or the car will stop running. Or imagine buying a house with nothing but Whirlpool appliances, designed so that a Kenmore fridge won't work."

It may actually be illegal, according to this law, to discuss any of this.

While on the Subject of China Dept.: Nowadays most brand-name PCs are made in China at monstrous facilities around Shanghai. These plants can make anything. So there's a story about Michael Dell visiting one of the giants, carrying a Compaq iPAQ with him. He gives the iPAQ to the design team with one instruction: "Make something cooler than this!" I would have just cloned the HP Jornada, but that's never going to happen.

Whether this story is true or not, it seems to me that asking mainland Chinese to make something cooler than an iPAQ is like asking Michael Jackson to pick out your wardrobe. You can expect a lot of chrome. I figure they'll deliver a Little Red iBook. How about a cell phone that holds 1.2 billion phone numbers? I could go on.

John Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the host of the weekly TV video podcast CrankyGeeks. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, Barrons, MacUser, PC/Computing, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. Was on the start-up team for CNet TV as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) was host of Silicon...
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